1437293 - Non relative profile path does not work

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[github]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20180123215146

Steps to reproduce:

In /home/username/.thunderbird/profiles.ini I have non relative profile path configuration like: 
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=username
IsRelative=0
Path=/data/username/thunderbird
Default=1

Last year icedove was migrated to thunderbird in debian 8. Thunderbird did not start, instead saying in a dialog "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system."

Found out that when using /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird-bin it worked, so /usr/bin/thunderbird script was changed to use thunderbird-bin instead of thunderbird. 
In February 2018, got new thunderbird (52.6.0 (64-bit)) updates and it stopped working again. This time it did not work to use thunderbird-bin, in fact it was already used since there is a link from thunderbird to thunderbird-bin. 

I spent some time on debugging. Starting thunderbird without any profile worked; a new profile was created. It also worked when I copied, without any changes, my profile from /data/username/thunderbird to /home/username/.thunderbird/username-profile and configured /home/username/.thunderbird/profiles.ini to:
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=username
IsRelative=1
Path=username-profile
Default=1

So it seems like non relative profile does not work like it did in earlier thunderbird. Tried using a link from /home/username/.thunderbird/username-profile to /data/username/thunderbird and ../../../data/username/thunderbird where both did not work. 
It only seems to work when relative profile configuration is used and when the profile is in a real directory in /home/username/.thunderbird/



Actual results:

Thunderbird does not start, instead saying in a dialog "Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system."


Expected results:

Expecting thunderbird to work like before by being able to start and use a non relative profile in /home/username/.thunderbird/profiles.ini like: 
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=username
IsRelative=0
Path=/data/username/thunderbird
Default=1

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Does the same happen in Firefox? Thunderbird uses Mozilla core software, and that includes profile management.

On Windows, I've used an absolute profile path from about day one and never had any problems ;-)

Aceman, something for you to look at.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Pretty sure I've seen this reported in the past year but I cannot find it in BMO.  Maybe it was a debian bug report.

Comment 3

[Carsten Schoenert]

Yes, and probably more than one. :)

This smells like https://bugs.debian.org/882218

I'm quite sure the user has the package apparmor installed and the profile for thunderbird is active. We added a simple logic to disable the AA profile if people have done a update from the regular version in testing to 52.5.0-1 so all users which don't have updated their Thunderbird package not manually should now have a not active AA profile automatically. For people who wanted to use the profile we respect this and don't disable the AA profile on updates. So if the profile was active before installing 52.6.0 we don't disable it without notifying the user.

We also ship a dedicated README file for the AppArmor profile since several weeks. But people often don't realize the information in the folder /u/s/d/thunderbird

https://salsa.debian.org/mozilla-team/thunderbird/blob/debian/sid/debian/README.apparmor

Another place of information is the Debian Wiki we try to extend with additional information.

https://wiki.debian.org/Thunderbird#AppArmor_profile

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks Carsten

Comment 5

[github]

Thanks for your quick response! 
I forgot about apparmor. Do not remember how I got apparmor to work earlier with non relative profile path.
I added local thunderbird apparmor configuration as described in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=882218 and now it works. Thanks for your help!